


The Ones Who Hurt You The Most

by OnceUponAFez



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Charming Family Feels, Complete, Daddy Charming, Mamma Snow, Night Terrors, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-28 00:53:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16230824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnceUponAFez/pseuds/OnceUponAFez
Summary: Emma Swan has lived a life of hell for as long as she could remember, a lost girl who didn't matter and didn't think she ever would. The past, she could live with that because she couldn't change it, but the nightmares that plagued her sleep was proving harder.





	The Ones Who Hurt You The Most

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StarkPark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkPark/gifts).



> I was in a feels war with Stark on Tumblr and this came out of it because I'm a sucker for Charming family feels and Emma needing her parents.

If ever Snow and David did have doubts about their choice to send Emma through the wardrobe, it was a night like this. A night when they would wake by a loud scream from above. A scream that was saved for only the cruellest of curses in every realm, a night terror.

Emma had nightmares. Of course she did. With all the shit she’d been through in her life it would have been worrying if she didn’t. But these weren’t the nightmares of the villains she’d faced as an adult, they were the ones of her childhood. The ones she had to face alone, no parents by her side to catch her when she fell or to give a speech full of hope. She had been all by herself.

These were the terrors she’d had before, of the people that plagued her sleep. It was supposed to end after she left the system, after she moved from home to home, but it didn’t. And nobody had ever been there to hold her when they got so bad she woke herself up, then cried herself back to sleep.

This one though, it had been different. She had been there before, in the living room of an old foster home. It was damp, cold and stunk of booze and cigarettes. Her chest was tightened from the smoke and she was wheezing from all the components mixed together. Now she was stood in the kitchen and stared down at the broken glass laying across the floor. Her hands trembled and a tear was already rolling down her face but she was silent. Yet the smash hadn’t been and there was a voice booming down the hallway, coming closer. Two voices: a male and a female.

Unlike her terrors before, this one had the faces of two people she knew that had hurt her the most. They hadn’t meant to and it wasn’t their fault, but they had sent her through the wardrobe and condemned her to this world’s harsh reality. David was stood in front of her, his face screwed up along with his fists, and Mary Margaret who she prayed would help her only smiled to her husband, saying what a bad girl Emma had been. Emma covered her face and cried out for them to stop, not to hurt her and that she’d be good.

All she saw now was darkness. It took her a moment to remember where she was and wipe the tears from her cheek. She was back in the loft.

Her hand instinctively gripped her baby blanket that was placed under her pillow and laid her head back onto it, crying the silent cry she’d learnt when she was little. She thought she’d gotten away with it. Thought they hadn’t noticed. But her yell into the apartment had echoed from wall to wall and alarmed both parents. Snow and David darted up the steps like nobody's business and switched the light on before Emma could wipe her eyes again.

There were the faces.

Emma jumped from the bed and backed away, still with her blanket in one hand. They stopped to give her some space, noticing how frightened their daughter was of them. Of them? What had they done to hurt their child?

“Emma, its us, your Mum and Dad.” David tried in a whisper and the softest tone he could muster.

But she knew that already, that’s why she was stood so far away. Another tear fell down her face and her grip on her blanket tripled, her knuckles turning whiter with the second.

“Did-did you have a nightmare?” Snow asked. Of course it was possible it might still happen as an adult, she had often awoke after her sleeping curse in a state of panic… but her daughter was afraid... of them?

Emma’s head whipped up to look at the voice she’d heard, her mother’s. Now realising the position she was in. She’d woken everyone up from a nightmare that had never been real, pushed them away from her and shown her just how weak she was, how weak she felt.

David took a small step forwards, then another after Emma hadn’t backed away. He got all the way to his daughter and took her in his arms, a hand finding the back of her head.

“It was just a dream.” He assured her, though he wasn’t most confident in knowing that it was.

Snow joined them, a hand rubbing soothing circles across Emma’s back. Emma melted into David, her head falling on his shoulder and closing her eyes. She could only have dreamt that her parents would be there when she woke up. Had been there when she was scared. She may not have been a child now but they were there, there when she woke up scared. She could only imagine that this never would have happened if they’d been there in the first place.


End file.
